Jonas Phillips | |
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Born | 1736 |
Died | 1803 (aged 66–67) |
Jonas Phillips (1736—1803) was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an American merchant in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the immigrant ancestor of the Jewish Phillips family in the United States. Emigrating from Germany in 1759, Phillips worked off his passage as an indentured servant in Charleston, South Carolina. He moved to the North in 1759, becoming a merchant in New York City and then moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A founder of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia during the war, Phillips and his wife had a total of twenty-one children. One of their great-grandsons was Franklin J. Moses, Jr., who was elected as governor of South Carolina in 1872 during the Reconstruction era; his father Franklin J. Moses, Sr. was Chief Justice of the state supreme court.[1] Another notable grandson was Uriah Phillips Levy, the first Jewish Commodore in the United States Navy.[2] An additional grandson was Mordechai Manuel Noah, American consul to Tunis and recognized as the most influential Jew in the early 19th-century United States.[3]
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